Over at Philosophy, et cetera, Richard Yetter-Chappell claims that religious belief is not reasonable. Here is Yetter-Chappell’s rationale behind his reasoning:
1. At most, the cosmological and fine-tuning arguments support minimal deism. (I’m not sure what minimal deism is; is it simply the claim that something outside of the universe is causally responsible for either the universe’s existence or for its order? Or is it the stronger claim that some kind of powerful, intelligent agent is causally responsible for either the universe’s existence or its order?)
2. The ontological argument is sophistic, and the modal ontological argument is question-begging.
3. The fact that lots of philosophers of religion think that religious belief is reasonable provides no evidence for thinking that it’s reasonable, because the best explanation for why they’re philosophers of religion in the first place is that they’re antecedently convinced of the claims of theism. Consequently, the best explanation of the fact that they find those arguments compelling is that they already believed them for non-evidential reasons.
4. There are very good reasons to disbelieve in theism, namely the arguments from evil and divine hiddenness. (I take it that Yetter-Chappell thinks that the responses to these arguments don’t discredit these arguments.)
5. The additional claims of historical religions are either not “the kind of thing someone could end up believing as the result of a careful and unbiased assessment of the evidence” (presumably, things like the doctrines of the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the Atonement, among others) or are “patently immoral” (like the doctrine of original sin, and the view that honest non-believers deserve eternal damnation).
(Yetter-Chappell doesn’t mention other arguments in the theistic arsenal, like Kant’s moral argument or the argument from miracles. I’m guessing he either doesn’t think they’re worthy of discussion or thinks they convince too few people to mention, or both.)
What is one to make of Yetter-Chappell’s post? A few things, I think:
First, I think that claims that philosophers of religion have made religious belief intellectually respectable are either overstated or false. Just based on anecdotal evidence, I get the impression that a lot of very intelligent philosophers, even ones who are personal acquaintances of Robert Adams, Marilyn Adams, Richard Swinburne, Eleonore Stump, Alvin Plantinga, Peter van Inwagen, or Dean Zimmerman feel the same way as Yetter-Chappell. It would be good to get some empirical information on whether this is the case.
Second, I must confess that his post unnerves me greatly. This is mainly because I get the impression that Yetter-Chappell is a very good philosopher who is intimately acquainted with much of contemporary philosophy of religion — as well-acquainted with it as many of the people who post on this blog, I’m assuming (is that fair?) — and I don’t think he has the slightest doubt about his views. By contrast, I have nagging, deep doubts about my own religious beliefs. I think this is partly because you can publish lots of secular philosophy in generalist journals while explicitly assuming the truth of naturalism, whereas you can’t publish philosophy that makes explicitly theistic assumptions in generalist journals (or can you? And if you can, under what circumstances can you do so? As a hypothetical? I don’t count those). Perhaps I’m simply neuro-atypical, but I think that would consistently add to the confidence in my convictions. (And this says nothing of the naturalistic assumptions you can make in most conversations with most philosophers.)
Third, I could be wrong, but I think you can run many of his arguments against moral realism. Let me go through them:
1*. What direct arguments are there in favor of moral realism? Michael Smith tries in The Moral Problem; how convincing is this? I gather that David Enoch, Russ Shafer-Landau, and Anita Superson try as well. How many are convinced?
2*. Kant’s deduction of the categorical imperative/Mill’s “proof” is sophistic. (There’s a “gap” in Kant’s deduction and Mill’s proof trades on an equivocation within “x is desirable” between “x is something that one can desire” and “x is something that one ought to desire”.)
3*. The fact that most normative ethicists and meta-ethicists (56.4%) are moral realists doesn’t give any evidence in favor of moral realism, because those scholars became ethicists because they were antecedently convinced of the truth of moral realism.
4*. There are very good reasons to disbelieve moral realism, such as Mackie’s argument from queerness and Harman’s point that you don’t need to invoke moral facts to explain anything about our behavior, attitudes, moral knowledge, etc. Indeed, this world is just the kind of world you would expect to see if our moral beliefs were the product of acculturation and evolutionary pressures.
5.* Most of the particular ethical beliefs that philosophers, and the public at large, have are not so much the result of careful study of evidence (few people look deeply into the evidence (sociological, psychological, economic, political scientific, etc.; nor are they the result of the application of a particular normative theory to cases), but rather because those beliefs are the ones their colleagues share, etc.
Even if one accepts the above parallels, though, I’m not sure what they show. I’m guessing you can easily accept all of 1-5 while denying 1*-5*, but I find it difficult to do so, personally. If you agree with me that there are at least some parallels between moral realism and theism, why do you think moral realism is so much more respectable than theism? (Assuming it is.)

Your question “Is religious belief reasonable?” is far too vague, and you slip back and forth between different questions.
Three questions: (1) Is Christian belief reasonable? versus (2) Is theism reasonable versus (3) Is deism reasonable? These are not at all the same. Nor are they even close to (4) Is religious belief reasonable? Obviously, there are many religions.
One can easily argue that Christianity is incoherent, factually false, and morally offensive while arguing that theism is coherent, factually adequate, and morally defensible. One can be an anti-Christian theist.
And one can argue that theistic realism, moral realism, and mathematical realism are all pretty much on par. But such arguments have nothing to do with Christianity.
Here the pressure falls on your 5 and 5*, which don’t seem parallel at all. Your 5 is about things that are factually false; your 5* is just about people being lazy.
So I’ll answer you like this: theistic belief is reasonable enough to hold without blame; but Christian belief is so defective on every measure that anyone who does hold it is both irrational and immoral.

“If you agree with me that there are at least some parallels between moral realism and theism, why do you think moral realism is so much more respectable than theism?”
Perhaps, because the argument from evil has more teeth if moral realism is true?

As a (tentative) moral realist myself, I’d definitely be concerned if the analogy was a close one. (Though I think the analogy is much closer with Deism, which I think is a perfectly reasonable view.)
One distinctive advantage of moral realism is that it can appeal to epistemic normativity as a “companion in guilt”. And it would be very strange to think that we could be epistemically unreasonable (violating a real normative standard) in believing that there are normative standards at all.
(I should also flag that I think the PhilPapers survey shows 56% of philosophers generally, not just ethicists, leaning towards or accepting moral realism. But I don’t put much weight on such numbers in any case — perhaps we’re all engaged in wishful thinking!)

Why do you think moral realism is so much more respectable than theism?
This probably won’t answer your question about respectability, which is a sociological and psychological question that philosophers have no special expertise to answer. But one might regard moral realism as more plausible than theism simply because it’s demonstrably logically weaker than theism.
If MR is the proposition that some things are morally good or bad, or morally right or wrong, independently of human say-so, then theism analytically implies MR but not conversely.

2. The ontological argument is sophistic, and the modal ontological argument is question-begging.
Whether the ontological argument is “sophistic” is an old sort of charge. It’s up there with “defining God into existence” charge, which is PHI 101. But this is not what the argument aims to do, it is not about semantics at all. The claim in the argument, to say things that everyone knows, is a de re modal claim. It is the claim that God (or call it what you will) has the essential property of existing. This is not so startling, lots of things necessarily exist. If the essential properties of God are co-instantiable, then God exists. All of the work is in establishing that the properties are co-instantiable. There is nothing either “sophistic” or question-begging in the argument that I can see, since co-instantiablity has to be established in some way. I don’t think Plantinga is wildly mistaken in maintaining that a rational person could take those properties to be co-instantiable, while agreeing that another rational person might not find them co-instantiable.
Concerning (4)
4. There are very good reasons to disbelieve in theism, namely the arguments from evil and divine hiddenness.
I can’t think of an argument from evil–evidential, logical, modal, etc.–for which there are not good responses. Theists fuss among themselves about what sorts of responses are best, but no one that I know thinks arguments from evil constitute compelling reasons against theism.
It might be that Chappell has in mind that there are overwhelming arguments in favor of theism and against atheism. True. But this is a feature of all philosophical arguments. There just aren’t overwhelming arguments in favor or against any interesting philosophical view.
I’m not sure what to make of the claim that theistic belief is not evidence for the rationality of belief. I guess you could as well run the “argument” (is this an argument?) the other way. The fact that atheists think that theism is not rational is not evidence that it isn’t, since they were antecedently committed to atheism. But frankly, I think this sort of point is dialectically useless.

“The fact that atheists think that theism is not rational is not evidence that it isn’t, since they were antecedently committed to atheism. But frankly, I think this sort of point is dialectically useless.”

“The fact that atheists think that theism is not rational is not evidence that it isn’t, since they were antecedently committed to atheism.”

Actually, I think it *some* evidence, just very weak. After all, a commitment to atheism does not entail a commitment to the non-rationality of theism, and there are atheists who think some (many?) theists are quite rational in their theism.

Commenting by iPhone, so forgive any typos. I think there are three things going on. First, widespread agreement about felt moral imperatives tend to be much more concrete and practical than widespread agreement about religious ideas. (Compare “One should save a drowning baby” with “Some intelligent agent or agents must’ve created the cosmos.)
Second, there doesn’t seem to be any parallel in moral realism with phenomena like literalism or divine authorship, ideas which tend to remove “religion” from the sphere of intellectual respectability.
Finally, some otherwise respectable philosophers of religion notoriously truck with intellectually disreputable ideas about science. This also lends a patina of disreputability to realism about religion.
So while I think the parallels you draw are more or less fair (full disclosure: I would be considered by most to be an anti-realist about morality), they aren’t enough in the face of these other factors to secure an image of respectability for religious realism in the minds of those who already believe it lacking.

re (1), the truth of the the cosmological and design argument’s conclusions, however construed, would raise the probability of any Western religion considerably. This is basic Swinburne. Further, Y-C’s post says about the design argument only that Darwin destroyed it. To say nothing about the fine-tuning argument is a curious lacuna, and raises a question, contra Gressis, about just how “intimately acquainted” Y-C is with contemprary phil of religion.
re (2), just what it is to beg the question is a contested matter, but on most standards, it is patently false that the modal OA begs the question. The main exception is Oppy’s, and his standard makes almost any deductive argument beg the question.
re (4), no philosopher has a right to assert this without telling us something about what’s wrong with free will defenses, defenses generally, and sceptical theism.
re (5), the doctrine of original sin has a number of interpretations. Very few these days construe it as “babies are born with one strike on their records, sufficient to damn them if they die.” Most philosophers of religion, I think, read it along the lines of “we are all born with an innate bias toward the bad.” That is not only not immoral, but quite plausible. And the fate of non-believers is a contested matter even among theologians, let alone philosophers. There is nothing approaching a consensus Christian position these days. (It might be different with The Folk in the pews, for all I know. But if you’re going to accuse philosophers of religion of being immoral for believing something, it behooves you to have in mind beliefs they actually hold.) Dante, I think, placed the pagan philosophers in a fairly pleasant limbo.

1. Regarding the cosmological and fine-tuning arguments and mere deism, we should have a strong preference for simple theories.
The simplest comprehensive theory I know about a designer x is this Leibnizian second order theory:
(P)(Perfection(P) → P(x)).
This is significantly simpler than any other designer theory at the same level of specificity and precision. The Leibnizian theory is very specific: it encodes us what power, intelligence, knowledge and moral character the designer has. Any other theory we can think of that has the same level of specificity is significantly more complex. Even theories that are much less specific and precise tend to be significantly more complex, e.g., Hume’s theory of a highly intelligent and very powerful designer (while the Leibnizian theory has only one primitive–perfection–Hume’s has two: intelligent and powerful).
This is a combination of the cosmological and/or fine-tuning arguments with ingredients from the ontological argument tradition.

Michael Drake:
‘Second, there doesn’t seem to be any parallel in moral realism with phenomena like literalism or divine authorship, ideas which tend to remove “religion” from the sphere of intellectual respectability.’
I don’t see what is unrespectable about divine authorship. Or about literalism about sacred texts (after all, it’s a reasonable theory about many other kinds of texts). It’s only the conjunction of the two that is, in the case of some texts, intellectually unrespectable.
The attraction of the conjunction of literalism and divine authorship is that it is just about the simplest theory to explain the genre of a sacred text and its relationship to God. Compare to utilitarianism on the moral side, which is just about the simplest moral theory to explain the connection between the good and the right.
Both of these, however, are cases where the simplest theory is too simple to be true, where this can best be seen from the theory’s absurd consequences. In the religious case, we get such absurd consequences as that the earth is no more than 10000 years old. In the moral case, we get the absurd consequence that if I can save 10 people and a cat by killing 10 people, with all other things being equal, then I should do it. In both cases, of course, there are smart people who embrace the absurd consequences and have clever stories about why we shouldn’t trust the appearance of absurdity, but that does nothing to render the theories more intellectually respectable in anything but a sociological sense.

Hi Eric,
The title, “Is Religious Belief Reasonable?” was the title of Y-C’s post, so I just used it myself. I was originally going to call it, “Is “Is Religious Belief Reasonable” Reasonable?”, but I thought it was too cute.

Adam, I’m not sure that the argument from evil has more teeth if moral realism is true. It may. But it’s often offered as a critique of the internal consistency or plausibility of theism. So, imagine you’re an expressivist who is also a theist, and you say, “I’m going to align myself with God’s norms. God is perfectly loving, powerful, etc. But wait … given that God is loving, why does God allow so much suffering to occur?” This seems, to me, to be a fairly reasonable position to hold, on the assumption that expressivism is reasonable (which I think it is). I’m not sure, then, that the truth of moral realism makes the teeth of the argument from evil sharper.

Hi Richard,
First, I’m wondering: in what sense do you think epistemic norms are “real” norms? (I’m guessing you’re not an expressivist about epistemic normativity?)
Second, you’re right about the numbers re: moral realism. I did try to narrow it simply to the opinion of normative ethicists and then meta-ethicists, but for some reason the 56% number came back at me for both of those groups. Anyway, when I tried it today, I got: 62.6% of normative ethicists are moral realists, and 55.9% of meta-ethicicists are moral realists.

Hi Steven,
You wrote: “If MR is the proposition that some things are morally good or bad, or morally right or wrong, independently of human say-so, then theism analytically implies MR but not conversely.”
I’m not following: are you saying that anyone who is a theist is a moral realist, but that not everyone who is a moral realist is a theist? I certainly agree with the second part, but I’m not sure you have to agree with the first part. Can’t you be a theist who’s an expressivist or a constructivist (assuming constructivism is a form of moral anti-realism)?

Robert, yes, I should have been clearer. My response was in part based on what Y-C wrote in his post:
“Some kind of minimal deism (motivated by the cosmological argument) seems reasonable enough. But (as I’ve previously noted) it’s a pretty big leap from there to theism, and an even bigger leap to the particular historical and theological claims of religions like Christianity.”
I cash out “minimal deism” as the bare claim that our universe has an intelligent designer-creator. (Maybe a god, maybe a super-civilization that runs our universe as a computer simulation, maybe whatever.)
Y-C is claiming this order of reasonableness:
Christianity

Robert,
An absolute measure of reasonableness is difficult to pin down. On the other hand I think it is pretty easy to see that philosophical theism is more reasonable than philosophical naturalism (and especially more reasonable than scientific naturalism which is the kind virtually all naturalistic philosophers subscribe too).
After all, where are the arguments for naturalism? Itâs a matter of debate how good the many arguments for theism are. But thatâs the point. Itâs an observational fact that naturalistic philosophers find arguments for theism worth thinking and debating about. Where are the arguments for naturalism any philosopher finds worth thinking and debating about?
Finally, a point about #4. I think I am right to claim that theistic philosophers are making steady if slow progress in solving these problems. Indeed I find that John Hickâs ideas are a big step in the right direction. So, where are the comparable advances of naturalism with the mind-body problem, or with the problem of free will, or of metaethics, or of how to explain the deep mathematical nature of the universe, or even of how to interpret quantum mechanics? I am inclined to think that the only way to describe a consistent naturalistic worldview is by denying the relevance of our sense of reason.

Hi Alexander, yes, the absurd consequences of literalism as-applied that you ably summarize are exactly what I had in mind.
What I had in mind in citing divine authorship was its invocation as an independent warrant or as a basis for special epistemic pleading.
And my points were really all only aimed at intellectual respectability in, as you say, the sociological sense (though I’ve always thought of intellectual respectability as inherently sociological).

As others have remarked, there are all kinds of religious views and this is so even if we limit ourselves to theistic religious view.
I too would want to know how deism and theism are distinguished. Traditionally, the difference was couched in terms intervention. The deistic God is creator but not intervenor. But its not clear to me that this is how Y-C is using the word. Its a common enough complaint that the cosmological argument at best proves a metaphysical absolute, not a personal God. But given that a personal God is also a metaphysical absolute, a ground of being if you will, proving that there is such thing increases the liklihood of theism (as someone said, this is old Swinburne stuff). The fine tuning argument seems to entail a personal creator, one with a purpose for the universe, and I am not quite sure how this is different from theism.
For myself, since I don’t really understand any sort of causation that is not either humean or agent causation, and humean causation is not going to explain the universe, the cosmological argument, if sound, makes the existence of a personal creator very very likely.
As for original sin and hellfire and damnation these are not even essential to Christian belief, let alone theism per se.
For a Christian, the historical argument would be based on the gospels, not later developments in theology anyway.
Nor is it clear to me that we can say “reasonable” tout court–a person with a vivid and powerful religious experience is, prima facie, in a different epistemic position that the rest of us.
But I do want to know: what is deism and how is it different from theism?

The fine tuning argument does not entail any personal creator. Fine tuning can be done by anything that runs an optimization algorithm – by an impersonal computer, or even by a purely physical dynamical system moving towards attractors in a phase space.

I don’t see how an algorithm can be purposeful except in a derivative way. If the fine tuning argument shows purposeful creation–the universe exists in order that there be conscious beings (perhaps among other end then either consciousness is presupposed or some sort of natural teleology. a mindless algorithm is just a an causal process disguised as purposeful action.The conclusion of of the fine tuning argument is that the universe was created or perhaps otherwise grounded with an end(s) in mind.. There might be metaphysical entities (e.g Plato’s GOOD) that would satisfy the argument. Or perhaps the much maligned recent sketchy proposals of Nagel, but any mere causal (efficient causal) process will not due.

Look at an example of guy like Lawrence Krauss, a person who believes in scientism. You could say that Lawrence Krauss is well aquainted with arguments against scientism, he knows other philosophers who disagree with him personally ie Massimo Pigilucci, Dan Dennet, Simon Blackburn. Yet he is still extremely confident in his scientism while his opponents don’t seem as confident about their position as he does.

Yeah, Krauss’s confidence doesn’t bother me, because he makes gross errors when philosophizing. It’s a kind of know-nothing confidence. By contrast, Y-C’s does bother me, because he knows philosophy so well — he knows how hard it is to do philosophy well, and how often really intelligent philosophers disagree with him about all sorts of issues, and yet on this issue — and, I suspect, on probably only this issue — he is quite confident that Christian belief is not only wrong, but unreasonable and immoral.

Hmm perhaps you are right its not a very good analogy. Actually, I recently watched a video of a discussion between Dean Zimmerman and Gideon Rosen on theism and atheism. After watching the video I was left with the same feeling you talk about in your post. Professor Rosen seemed pretty certain that Christianity was obviously false and immoral. By contrast, I didn’t get the sense that Professor Zimmerman had the same level of confidence in his beliefs, but was much more tentative. So you are left with two very reasonable and well informed philosophers one is very confident in his atheism and the other is more tentative and uncertain, I can see why that asymmetry would be bothersome.

Is the ‘reasonable’ doing any work that some other status (warranted, justified, etc) couldn’t?
I ask b/c I’m surprised that nothing’s been said about the possibility that religious experience might justify theistic belief. (Maybe to be ‘reasonable’ in some belief we must be able to give propositional grounds for it or something, I don’t know–in which case religious experience wouldn’t work)
I tend toward moral realism for reasons similar to why the religious experience/Reformed epistemology folk tend toward theism. I keep having these experiences of value outside of myself, usually in nature and face-to-face with other people (and animals as well). It keeps seeming to me that there’s real value out there, and I haven’t yet come across any anti-realist arguments that I take to be strong enough to defeat this seeming. Analytic moral philosophers don’t talk much about moral phenomenology, but for me that’s where the action’s at, so far as grounding moral realism.

Gordon –
Your claims about algorithms are merely prejudiced. It’s straightforward to produce an algorithm which,given a utility function, searches through a possibility landscape until it maximizes the utility function.
One can easily do this for cellular automata like the game of life – it’s *easy* to write an algorithm that searches through the possibility space of 2D totalistic cellular automata to find CAs that maximize internal evolvability. No mysteries needed.
Purposiveness is irrelevant. And algorithms can be genuinely purposive anyway. And they can be as mindful as your brain is mindful. And Smolin has already described a purely physical optimization process which finely tunes universes for the internal evolution of life.
– Eric

Alex, that’s an excellent question. Whether it’s an algorithm or a divine person which does the optimizing, the whole thing faces a Euthyphro dilemma. Still, it’s a bit off-topic: I’ve never seen anybody say universe was finely tuned for the good, just for life or intelligent life or the evolution of complexity or some such. – Eric

Your claims about algorithms are merely prejudiced. It’s straightforward to produce an algorithm which,given a utility function, searches through a possibility landscape until it maximizes the utility function.
One can easily do this for cellular automata like the game of life – it’s *easy* to write an algorithm that searches through the possibility space of 2D totalistic cellular automata to find CAs that maximize internal evolvability. No mysteries needed.

‘Why is the universe fine-tuned? Someone wrote an algorithm with the required utility function, apparently.’

I think Yetter-Chappell rejects the view that a person can be justified in believing a proposition on the basis of private evidence. But this rejection is a mistake. A person’s having evidence for the truth of some proposition does not entail her being able to “give” such evidence to others in a way that will (or could) automatically justify their belief in the same proposition.

One important difference between theism and moral realism is that moral truths cannot enter into causal relations but a god could. According to the major monotheistic religious traditions, there is a god who reveals himself to particular individuals in ways and at times of his own choosing.